The mighty Heather MacDonald boiled down the results of liberalism in her report on the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco.
Here, in microcosm, she lays out the fundamental connections between those with their hands out, and the Liberal mindset that encourages same .

1. Four filthy targets of Homelessness, Inc.s current relabeling effort sprawl across the sidewalk on Haight Street, accosting pedestrians. Can you spare some change and shit? Will you take me home with you? Cory, a slender, dark-haired young man from Ventura, California, cockily asks passersby. Dude, do you have any food? His two female companions, Zombie and Eeyore, swig from a bottle of pricey Tejava tea and pass a smoke while lying on a blanket surrounded by a fortress of backpacks, bedrolls, and scrawled signs asking for money. Vincent, a fourth traveler, as the Haight Street punks call themselves, stares dully into space.

a. Starting in late 1965, the emergent drug culture promised liberation from the bourgeois values of self-discipline and hard work. The time has come to be free, a local flyer proclaimed. Be FREE. Do your thing. Be what you are. Do it. Now.

2. Im not begging, Im just asking for money, Cory says, seemingly convinced of the difference. How much do you make? In San Francisco, you dont get muchmaybe $30 to $40 a day, says Eeyore. When youre traveling, you can make about $100 on freeway off-ramps.  The defining characteristic of all these travelers seems to be an acute sense of entitlement. 

3. Meantime, welfare will do just fine. A strapping young redhead trudging down Haight Street with a bedroll and a large backpack explains the convenience of his electronic food-stamp card, which he can use to pick up his benefits wherever he happens to bewhether in Eugene, Oregon, 

4. community frustration with the gutter punks rising aggressiveness had led the Haights police captain, Teri Barrett, to propose a new law that would ban sitting or lying on city sidewalks from 7 AM to 11 PM. The homelessness industry instantly mobilized against the Civil Sidewalks law. Its first tactic was to assimilate the gutter punks into the homelessness paradigm, so that they could be slotted into the industrys road-tested narrative about the casualties of a heartless free-market economy. Homelessness, at its core, is an economic issue, intoned the Coalition on Homelessness, San Franciscos most powerful homelessness advocacy group, in a report criticizing the proposed law. People are homeless because they cannot afford rent.

a. applied to the able-bodied Haight vagrants, it is simply ludicrous, entailing a cascading series of misrepresentations regarding the role of choice in youth street culture. The Haight punks may not be able to afford rent, but that is because they choose to do no work and mooch off those who do.

b. Shoehorning the street kids into the homeless category requires ignoring their own voices, ordinarily a big no-no among progressives when it comes to official victims of capitalism and other oppressions. They are not homeless, the travelers insist, and they look down on those who are.

5. OK here it comes: The executive director of Larkin Street Youth Services in criticizing the sit-lie proposal. Funding to help these youths through outreach, case management, education and employment has been severely cut over the past two years. . . . Rather than rallying in anger, a better use of our time is to focus on helping youths exit the streets so they can find work and housing and become contributing members of the community. Translation: Homelessness, Inc. wants more money.

a. But a social-services empire has grown up around the street vagrants; its members livelihood depends on a large putative client population, even if the clients arent interested in their services.

6. The homelessness industrys second tactic was to demonize Civil Sidewalks supporters as motivated by hatred toward the poor. This issue makes me sick to my stomach, the head of the Coalition on Homelessness, Jennifer Friedenbach, told a supervisors meeting in May. It makes me sick because were putting into place another law that promotes hatred and that will codify economic profiling.

7. the homelessness advocates pulled out their trump card: associating supporters of the Civil Sidewalks law with business interests. San Francisco progressives regard businessmen as aliens within the body politic whose main function is to provide an inexhaustible well of funds to transfer to the citys social-services empire. If these corporations pay their fair share, supervisor John Avalos explained in 2009 when introducing a new business tax, we can generate millions that will go towards keeping health clinics, youth and senior services, and jobs safe for San Franciscans. (The contradiction between raising business taxes and keeping jobs safe was lost on Avalos.)

8. The supervisors voted in June against the sit-lie law eight to three, though the public had backed it by a 71 to 24 percent margin in an earlier 2010 poll. [It was approved by voters in 2010.]

a. MacDonald calculates that the city spends the equivalent of $26,865 in services for each of its homeless persons. The total is three times what it spends on police and fire departments.

9. At the May hearing on the sit-lie law, a petite young black woman mocked the progressives claim that they were fighting for the [homeless] population. You people in the social-service mafia make money off this population, she retorted, and then go home to neighborhoods where people are not loitering, puking, and pissing outside your door 24 hours a day. We dont need you here; we need accountability for low-income residents who go to work and dont do drugs 24/7.The Sidewalks of San Francisco by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal Autumn 2010

Your much heralded "trickle down", "conservative" policies have made more and more people homeless and dependent on government on levels not seen since the great depression. And that's a fact. You can't really blame "liberals" whoever that might be in your partisan hack mind. Don't you work? Why are you spewing rw propaganda all over this board ALL DAY LONG?

If you pay people to be poor, they will just get better at being poor. Conservative policies have made people dependent on government? Really? So lets eliminate all the dependency programs and see if the poor and homeless shape up.

Conservative policies have made people dependent on government? Really? So lets eliminate all the dependency programs and see if the poor and homeless shape up.

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YES, they did. And what you wrongly call "dependency programs" were set up by "liberals" to deal with the fallout from failed supply-side (corporatist ahem, "conservative") economics... just like the new deal was set up to counter the damage done by the robber barons and banksters in the 20's & 30's.

Conservative policies have made people dependent on government? Really? So lets eliminate all the dependency programs and see if the poor and homeless shape up.

Click to expand...

YES, they did. And what you wrongly call "dependency programs" were set up by "liberals" to deal with the fallout from failed supply-side (corporatist ahem, "conservative") economics... just like the new deal was set up to counter the damage done by the robber barons and banksters in the 20's & 30's.

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The new deal prolonged the depression until the nation ended it by going to war. Liberals worship the third world. Their goal is to reduce the US to one low, but universal, standard of living that no one can rise above.

Your much heralded "trickle down", "conservative" policies have made more and more people homeless and dependent on government on levels not seen since the great depression. And that's a fact. You can't really blame "liberals" whoever that might be in your partisan hack mind. Don't you work? Why are you spewing rw propaganda all over this board ALL DAY LONG?

Jesus H Christ...

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Not what the tale the facts tell....

1. The recession was due to the housing policies of Democrat/liberals, beginning with FDR's creation of the GSE's Fannie and Freddy....
...and can be traced to Carter and the CRA, Clinton and his HUD, Frank and Dodd.

Had the Democrats obeyed the restrictions in Article I, section 8, none of this would have happened.

2. It is Progressive policy to have more and more Americans on the dole, and beholden to government. Sad, isn't it....we have almost reached the 'tipping point...'

3. While you pretend not to understand, Paul Ryan does:

Before the tipping point, Americans remain independent and take responsibility for their own well-being. Once we have gone beyond the "tipping point," that self-sufficient outlook will be gradually transformed into a soft despotism a lot like Europe's social welfare states. Soft despotism isn't cruel or mean, it's kindly and sympathetic. It doesn't help anyone take charge of life, but it does keep everyone in a happy state of childhood. A growing centralized bureaucracy will provide for everyone's needs, care for everyone's heath, direct everyone's career, arrange everyone's important private affairs, and work for everyone's pleasure. The only hitch is, government must be the sole supplier of everyone's happiness ... the shepherd over this flock of sheep. RealClearPolitics - Should America Bid Farewell to Exceptional Freedom?

4. But, I know that you really understand the Liberal attempt to instill an "assumption of incompetence" in the American people....I know it due to the vehemence in your post.

For the Left, there is the Assumption of Incompetence .unable, incapable, incompetent. The nanny is caring, compassionate .but smothering. Basically, its motto is We care so much about you, that well take over from here and run your life for you. Appearing to be compassion, the Assumption of Incompetence actually treats clients with a mixture of pity and contempt.

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